


Material facts

by Lilliburlero



Series: Consistently Homesick [6]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 07:50:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2340710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Oh for Pete's sake! That wasn't what I meant! In twenty years time we'd be Two Terrible Tweedy Types known far and wide as The Queer Miss Marlows.' —<i>Peter's Room</i>, ch. 8.</p><p>Twenty years is probably an overestimate. In fact, it may have already happened.</p><p>Follows the events of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2325596">this fic</a>.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: references to attempted suicide, with highly unsympathetic attitudes expressed thereto, references to homophobia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Material facts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



> who hoped there was [more of the story](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/15943343). There isn't, not much, but there is a propelling pencil in a cameo role. I'm sure it's symbolic of something or another.

Nicola knocked.

‘Come in,’ said Rowan briskly.

After the electric light of the hallway, the estate room, lit only by the anglepoise lamp on the desk, seemed very dark. Rowan was sitting at the desk, doing something with a penknife to a propelling pencil. She looked up. Her dark blue eyes, narrowed by squinting against the weather, gave her an appraising look even when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling.

‘Mum thought you might like a slice of cake with your Min. of Hungriculture and Wisheries stuff.’

‘If it’s one of Doris’s sugarless wonders, not. But things might get to the pemmican stage before all these are filled in. Leave it there, will you?’  She nodded toward a filing cabinet in front of the desk. Nicola put the plate down on some manila wallets.

Rowan looked thin and old. A stranger seeing her with Giles and Kay would have pegged her for the eldest by about ten years, though she wasn’t twenty for another month yet. Lines of decision showed around her mouth; her face was marked with the bleak self-discipline of one who means to follow through the consequences of a mistake. The mistake, Nicola thought, feeling sick in the pit of her stomach, in which she had encouraged her. Rowan put down the penknife.

‘Don’t stand there like a dummy.  Good night.’

‘Ro—’

‘Good _night_ , Nick. I can’t trust myself to talk to you for long without roaring, and I need my voice for shouting to Ted above the tractor engine and across three-quarters of a windy acre.’

Planting her feet firmly and squaring her shoulders, Nicola delivered herself of a stubborn blurt. ‘I thought you should know before college begins again that it wasn’t anybody you know that I went—went—to—s—see.’ 

‘What an _appalling_ sentence. Out with it, Nick. I haven't got time for this.’  Rowan laid the pencil carefully beside the penknife.

‘What I said. I know what you think and it wasn’t.’

Rowan’s eyes, inky in the low light, raked her coldly, head to foot. Unable to meet them, Nicola stared earnestly at the empty wastepaper basket.

‘You no doubt think this _no names, no packdrill_ routine very high-minded, but for your information, it’s just incomprehensible.’ 

‘I didn’t meet—’ The name had never been easy to say; now it was impossible. ‘I haven’t seen him since the Merricks’ hooli.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Rowan said shortly. ‘Buzz off.’  The expression she used was a good deal coarser.

‘Yes you _do_ , Ro.’

‘Do you even realise,’ she said evenly, ‘that your recent behaviour has been something close to certifiable?’

‘Yes—I’ve been a—’ all the usual terms expressing lunacy seemed inadequate. ‘I suppose so.’

‘You _suppose_ so?’  There was a compressed snap in Rowan’s voice that was rather more intimidating than the threatened roar, but it touched some nerve that produced exhilaration instead of alarm. Nicola took a step forward.

‘Sorry. But this isn’t about me really. I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t Ralph,’ Nicola had never said his Christian name aloud and on its own before, and at once the giddy feeling left her. ‘Lanyon,’ she gulped, ‘that I met.’

Rowan pushed back the chair, and stood up, throwing her face abruptly into shadow. She made a little outward movement, paused, and withdrew. They were years too old for scrapping; even Binks had packed that in _yonks_ ago, but Nicola found herself nonetheless glad of the desk between them.

‘You _bloody_ fool.’

‘I thought it might help to know it wasn’t him. If you see him again in college.’

‘And why on _earth_ would you think that?’

Nicola found her voice suddenly clear and free, as it had been when she told Anquetil that Lewis Foley was dead. ‘Because you like him as much as I do.’

‘I hardly know him,’ Rowan said mechanically.

‘You know him well enough to notice—when you said I had _a pal for life_.’

‘Quite the budding analyst.’  She sat down with a slow, spent weariness. ‘Just observation, Nick. Proud people with—injuries are often self-conscious about them, and he is, very. But not with you. That’s all I meant. For God’s sake don’t get all Lower Fifth over—’

‘You were wrong, anyway.’ 

‘Oh?’

‘He told me not to—call again. Dropped like a stone, I was.’

Rowan leaned back in the chair. ‘I’m sorry, Nick. I really am.  But you must see it’s for the best.’  She picked up the pencil again and, absently absorbed, screwed it up and down. It ratcheted dispiritedly. 

‘I don’t, actually,’ Nicola said candidly.

‘If you want to know what I think, one reason is he reckoned it would've meant too much. To him too, if that's worth anything to you. And polite society looks a bit askance at single men in their thirties taking up with fifteen-year-old girls.’

‘But he isn’t—’

‘I know. Polite society looks askance at that too. Not to _mention_ the law. Now do you see?’

About to protest injustice, Nicola unexpectedly recalled the ugly wallpaper in Robert’s Anquetil’s narrow room: its corpse-green floral pattern, the grimy tidemark six inches above head-height.  ‘I thought—one sort of cancelled out the other somehow. It _does_ sound fairly mad when I say it out loud.’

A cynical, rakish smile, unfamiliar to Nicola, curled the corners of her sister’s mouth. ‘Your spontaneous reactions are going to land you in a lot of trouble, if you don’t look out.’

‘I think they already have.’

‘Well, you’re perfectly right about that, anyway.’  Rowan put her thumb over the tip of the pencil and depressed the unresisting fragment of lead that had at last emerged. She glanced up speculatively. ‘There’s no chance you’d tell me who you _did_ meet, I suppose?’

Nicola hesitated.  If there was anyone who might be trusted with the details of the Foley thing, who might even know some way to help Anquetil—but she saw immediately that she had presumed, noisy and obdurate, on the scanty time of someone who was very tired.  ‘Not a snowball’s. But thank you. For not telling Mum, what you suspected—’ Nicola dropped her voice, ‘for letting her think it was something to do with Edward Oeschli.’

The hard blue-black shine left Rowan’s eyes. _Take absolutely no notice_ , Nicola thought, and had to look down.

‘It must have been difficult,’ she continued, mumbling rather, ‘bringing all that up again.’

Rowan's face was fixed and still. ‘I don’t have much time for people who do that sort of thing as—a form of back-talk,' she said stiffly.

Nicola, baffled for a moment, suddenly remembered Judith Oeschli, the gossip of a year ago: _permanent liver damage_ , _she’ll always be sickly_ , _poor soul, driven to distraction she must've been_ , _but how could she be so selfish and her a mother when all's said and done_? But Rowan, alone of all of them, had to hear it daily, for months, until Judith had moved away and been consigned to the entire oblivion of those who cause a stir in a small English village and then flee it.

‘It’s blackmail however it ends up,’ Rowan went on crisply, ‘Blackmailers are beneath contempt, but I don't have much pity for anyone who's prepared to submit to it either. It’s a matter of what your self-respect’s worth to you.’

Nicola wondered if Rowan could really believe that. It sounded too impossibly flinty. She said tentatively, ‘All the same, how ghastly to have to rake over it. Thanks.’

‘I didn’t do it for you, Nicola. Be quite clear about that.’  In the slanting light from the anglepoise the hollows of Rowan’s cheeks deepened to pools of shadow.  

‘I know you didn’t. But why? When you thought he’d—been so—irresponsible?’ 

‘I think they call it _esprit de corps_. You’ll see the point—’ Rowan paused a moment, blankly, then looked searching again, ‘of all this, later.’

Nicola, for whom the French tag meant Miss Keith in especially character-building form, felt as if she were trying to read a book in a dream, the pages riffling past her eyes too quickly for comprehension.

‘Look, you’d better scram, Nick.’ 

Nicola dithered for a moment, remembering toddlerhood, when she and Lawrie had kissed the whole family goodnight. ‘G’night, Rowley.’ She gave a quick smile over her shoulder as they parted, regretting it almost instantly as one of her brave, irritating, convalescent ones.

Rowan rested her elbows on the desk and her chin in her hands, shuddering as she relaxed for the first time since Nicola had entered. What she _wanted_ was someone to take in her arms—Felicity Evans of Accounting (II), for preference: glittering, sardonic eyes, long neck and maddeningly awkward oblong torso, and hang genial, brisket-faced George Farringdon, to whom Fliss was inexplicably affianced, but at this pitch of frustration Rowan wasn’t all that choosy—or a drink, or both.  What she _had_ was a plate of indigestible cake, a silver propelling pencil (once Cousin Jon's) broken beyond use, and the uneasy knowledge that honour demanded an apology to Ralph Lanyon which she would never—whether through want of courage or inclination she wasn’t sure—bring herself to make. Sleep—of which she’d had very little this month—would reconcile her to some of her discontents, and hard work must make shift with the rest. Her head drooped, intolerably heavy, and her elbows slithered hazardously on the papers in front of her. She sat up straight with an effort that called upon her deepest reserves of energy, took her fountain pen from the tray to the right of the blotter, and began to transcribe details of sires and dams, tag numbers and dates, weight and sex, live- and still-births, condensing them from the minutiae of the farm log to the impersonal conventions of Min. of Ag. forms.

**Author's Note:**

> There are too many quotations here to note every instance. They're mostly drawn from chapter 2 of _The Charioteer_ , but there are snippets from elsewhere in that novel and from other sources. I think they call it _homage_.


End file.
